


wishing you godspeed

by becuille



Category: Black Panther (2018), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Ending, Angst, Black Panther (2018) Spoilers, Cousin Incest, Fix-It, Frottage, Kinda, M/M, Mutual Masturbation, Play Fighting, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-23 22:02:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13797234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/becuille/pseuds/becuille
Summary: T’Challa feels a pang of something, half nostalgia half regret. He could almost see the two of them growing up together, sparring together, laughing together. They would have grown up more like brothers, he knows it. Erik visiting in the evening in his room wouldn’t have given him an anxious knot in his stomach, it might have been commonplace.





	wishing you godspeed

T’Challa drags Erik’s body, a dead almost lifeless weight, above ground and out of the Mound like he is dragging Lazarus out from his tomb. 

He slips out of awareness in T’Challa’s arms and it takes a long time for him to heal enough to regain consciousness, but he survives. Shuri cares for her cousin like T’Challa imagines she might care for him if it arose; tenderly and with fierce determination. He doesn’t interrupt her while she works.

Like a cousin should, if they had been raised as such, he stays by his bedside. He is still of royal lineage, and T’Challa owes it to him and to the country to ensure he pulls through. It wouldn’t just be unkind to leave him alone, it would be unsafe, as well as politically foolish. How could his people trust a ruler that would abandon his own blood?

After a few days, after Shuri starts to tease him for his unkempt beard and red eyes, Erik blinks open his eyes. He asks for water with a voice like gravel, but T’Challa leaves without a word, sending Okoye to watch over him. He is a man and a king, but he isn’t ready to face up to the sins of his father just yet.

  


* * *

  


It’s easy for T’Challa to avoid him. He stays confined to the palace and away from his sister’s labs, then when Erik starts to recover, has him monitored at all times, following his every move.

Shuri brings him updates on his status, regardless.

“Your _cousin_ , she reminds him, to his displeasure, “is doing very well. His internal bleeding has stopped and there will be no lasting damage. He is resilient, like you.” She sits on his desk where he is sat, obscuring the view of his work. “You know, he reminds me of father, in a way. He has that ruthless streak he had.”

“Don’t get attached to your patient again,” he warns, only half teasing.

“I know, I know. Are you ready for tomorrow?”

The thought brings him a wave of nausea, but he doesn’t show it. “Are you?” he asks, deflecting.

Shuri rolls her eyes. “You haven’t been to see him once. Is that any way to treat your family?”

His sister has a sharp mind and is wiser than she likes to let on, and T’Challa can’t shake the notion that he has mistreated his kin. Over dinner, he calls Okoye over, knowing well her discretion. He requests that she bring their prisoner to his room once supper has ended, to make things right with his cousin, or to ease his conscience, if nothing else. It could be his last chance.

  


* * *

  


The sky goes dim and a cool breeze courses through the open balcony of T’Challa’s quarters as the evening sets in. After a prefunctary knock, Okoye opens his door, followed by Erik, his hands tied behind his back again. 

“Those are not necessary,” he tells her. She nods, but undoes his restraints with some trepidation. Erik flexes his wrists, but lingers on the threshold of his room just inside the doorway, uncharacteristically unsure.

T’Challa feels a pang of something, half nostalgia half regret. He could almost see the two of them growing up together, sparring together, laughing together. They would have grown up more like brothers, he knows it. Erik visiting in the evening in his room wouldn’t have given him an anxious knot in his stomach, it might have been commonplace.

He relieves Okoye, who returns to her post outside his room, and wrings his hands together, restless.

“Your trial is tomorrow. You will be under my custody until then.”

“Uh huh.”

“Is there anything you need?”

“I’m good. Nice place you've got here though,” Erik says, pushing past him and out of the doorway. T’Challa considers him carefully as he sits on the edge of his bed. “I could never get to sleep on this while you were, you know, dying, or whatever. Way too soft.”

“If it makes you feel better, I got little sleep on the edge of death on the top of a freezing mountain.”

They could have been like this, in another future. Friends at best or at least friendly adversaries at worst. Maybe even brothers.

As T’Challa turns his back, Erik lunges for him, pressing him to the wall. His stomach drops. That future is shattered and trodden into the ground, he has been betrayed again. His feet take a well practiced stance, giving him purchase to resist his attack and push back. 

“I never yielded, you know,” he says. “This could still be all mine.”

“I think not,” T’Challa returns, studying him, waiting for him to make the first move, his veins on edge with adrenaline. He’s smirking; is he mocking him?

T’Challa pushes and grapples with him, his hands digging into Erik’s biceps and rippled scars and his feet shuffling off balance. He stays on the defensive, figuring him out, watching closely.

Erik shrugs off his grip and lands a dirty blow to his stomach in one swift motion, weaker than the last time they fought but still strong. T’Challa was not expecting him to actually hit him with conviction, not here, unarmed and in his own bedroom in the low light of early evening. Erik takes advantage of his disorientation to sweep the ground from under his feet 

T’Challa lands on the floor, not at all graceful, and Erik advances on him, almost predatory, crushing him to the ground. Their bodies are flush from chest to thigh, and an unexpected ripple of deep laughter takes T’Challa by surprise, and he huffs out a surprised breath. T’Challa’s arms are pinned to the floor with crushing pressure on his wrists, and the rush of adrenaline causes a sinking drop in his stomach. A king should not play fight, that’s not what happens. It is a fight for dominance, T’Challa tells himself. Two heirs to the throne of a proud nation fighting for their honour. He rolls with him, vying for power, his arms still restricted. 

Something deep in his gut urges him to lean up to and kiss him. The urge has been haunting his nights and waking hours, like a dark ugly shadow following him around. He presses his lips chastely on the other man’s; they’re rough and bitten but warm and tender. Erik has never fought fair in the short time he’s known him, so he has no reason to.

He kisses him harder when Erik makes a groan of protest, and frees his hands in his moment of weakness.

Erik curses, then dips to kiss him again, harder and deeper, possessing him. T’Challa wonders if every kiss he’s ever had has been like this, an absolute. Like life and death, black and white, no in between soft and vulgar. He ruts himself against the bone of T’Challa’s hip, half-hard, while he holds him in place. While T’Challa is dazed, he pulls off his shirt, as if to scare him off, to remind him what he is. T’Challa skims his finger over scar after scar, barely even touching, while he is still restricted by Erik’s powerful legs holding him down.

Growing more desperate for some sort of touch, anything at all, T’Challa grinds up to meet him, the light fabric of his clothes doing little to hide his hardness. It might be the elicit, secret act they’re committing that spurs him on. Or it could the fact that he might never see Erik again, or even the strength of being restrained by a man who has defeated him before, but quickly T’Challa grows desperate, biting the inside of his cheek to hold back wanton noises.

Erik pulls down both their pants, exposing them and chafing his skin with his urgency. He takes hold of him, and the vulnerability he is showing to his enemy gives him a head rush. He almost can’t stand it. 

“Yield,” Erik says, getting breathless. “And I’ll finish it.”

He jerks him off fast, bringing him close shamefully fast. Erik’s palm is rough but firm and grips his cock so tight he might explode. 

T’Challa closes his eyes, breathing deep, unwilling to lose, so close already. He daren’t move, can’t speak, can’t command him to finish what he started, afraid of startling him like an untamed animal. Erik grips T’Challa’s ankles, raising them up, and rocks his own cock between his thighs. He leaks precome onto the taut muscles of his legs and ruts into him faster, not letting up the unyielding pressure on his dick. 

“ _Please_ ,” T’Challa finally lowers himself to beg, face burning with hot shame. Erik lets him go and T’Challa winces. He wants the earth to swallow him up if Erik was playing him all this time for a petty victory, if he leaves him now. He groans in relief as Erik lines up their pricks and jerks them both off together, his hand moving quick and brutal. That’s how he must like it. Not that that knowledge will be of much use. By morning he will be sentenced, the inevitability of it like the coming of dawn.

T’Challa comes first, messily over the firm lines of his own stomach. If his people could see him now, pinned down and subjugated by his usurper. Erik comes on him too, and T’Challa watches him, fascinated. Erik has allowed him that split second of weakness, his enemy.

Soon enough, T’Challa drags them off the floor, like they have just been playing like children do until their backs ache and stomachs burn and eyes grow heavy. T’Challa coaxes him, unwilling, into his bed.

Erik can’t look at him. He can’t look at any of it. The luxury he might have lived in had he won, the view of what would have been his kingdom, not even him. 

“You still must be held accountable,” T’Challa tells him, solemn, eventually breaking the quiet of just the rise and fall of their chests.

“Yeah, I know.”

“But crime and punishment is different here. Your sentence will be of benefit to the country, as the people see fit. It would be of no benefit to send a royal heir and a soldier away.” T’Challa’s finger catches on the ridge of a scar, low, near Erik’s hip. “I could ask them to consider appointing you as an advisor to foreign militaries, to serve out your time.”

“Don’t bother.”

The momentary blips he saw of what he and Erik might have been like are gone as soon as they showed themselves. T’Challa kisses him as if he could repent for his father’s sins, in mourning for the family he might have had. He wonders if anyone has ever kissed him like this, soft and sad and tender. Erik pulls away from him.

The sky is bleeding lilac and orange beyond the balcony, but Erik isn’t looking at it either, he’s staring blankly up at the ceiling, until his eyes finally close. 

T’Challa lets Erik sleep, as much as he can sleep in his too-soft bed. With his mind swirling with ill feeling about his trial in the morning, T’Challa doesn’t manage much either.

  


* * *

  


There is an uproar as Erik is brought through tall double doors into the court, flanked by Okoye and Ayo. They force him to his knees in front of the judge and jury and their king in mock penance.

The court finds him guilty of treason, among other crimes. Propelled by the outrage and furore of the citizens, Erik is sentenced to fifteen years of labour in the mountains. People of his country have lost their life because of his folly; sons and daughters, parents. T’Challa can do little in good conscience to change the punishment his people believe is just. As he is led away, bound and shackled, he doesn’t look back. 

Erik was trained to spread dissent and to topple governments, T’Challa considers himself collapsed.

**Author's Note:**

> hello hi I am here to fill the porn quota for this fandom  
> title from the [Frank Ocean song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvh09LxXpAQ/)
> 
> edit: reuploaded bc wasn't showing up in the tags sry!


End file.
